


Out of the Azure Blue

by angelinthecity



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman, Find Me - André Aciman
Genre: Book Universe, Canon Related, Cheating, Dates that they pretend are not dates, Fix-It, Flashbacks, Flirting, Fluff, Happy Ending, Kissing, Light angst of the pining and cheating kind, M/M, Marc Chagall's life and art, Mentions of Micol (Oliver's wife), Mutual Pining, Oliver's POV, Reunions, Romance, Smut, Talking, The French Riviera, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:41:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26391349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelinthecity/pseuds/angelinthecity
Summary: When he came to the university, it wouldn’t have taken long. I sometimes played with the thought of how much longer we would’ve needed to sit in that booth before we would’ve surrendered to what was still happening between us. Five more minutes? Ten?Eight months after Elio visited Oliver at his university and refused to come for dinner, they run into each other out of the blue on the French side of the Mediterranean Riviera. Oliver is still very much married but the thing is—he’s also still very much in love with Elio. Moonlit walks, dares, and conversations on what constitutes as playing with fire ensue.[COMPLETED Nov 5, 2020]
Relationships: Oliver/Elio Perlman
Comments: 632
Kudos: 388





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [За лазурной синью](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26953732) by [Aira81](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aira81/pseuds/Aira81)



They say that one shouldn't trust anyone who doesn't kiss with their eyes closed. But sometimes I had wanted to watch: see his lids fall in preparation, see the perfect imperfections on his cheekbones up close. The shadows of my face falling on his, him surrendering to my possession for the duration of the kiss.

Because he was only mine when he was pressed against me. On me. Inside me. After, he would be his own entity again, twirling across the hallways and lawns. My heart in his back pocket.

The way he’s doing it now, playing in the water. He kicks it and it splashes all the way to my shins, coaxes me to leave my shoes and join him in the shallow waves. The sea is warm from the day but it still cools my ankles when I wade in. The rocks are smoother there than on the beach, but they roll and move under our feet and he stumbles. I catch him and balance myself better than he does, I always have, but it’s all a façade. People think I’m patient and controlled but it’s only because I am either on or off, all or nothing. I couldn’t have a taste of him without wanting to swallow him whole, so I denied myself completely. Until I didn’t. The storm brewing until it reached critical mass.

When he came to the university, it wouldn’t have taken long. I sometimes played with the thought of how much longer we would’ve needed to sit in that booth before we would’ve surrendered to what was still happening between us. Five more minutes? Ten?

The voices from the beach become more erratic, the early evening revelers giving way to the younger crowd on their way to the nightclub on the seaside promenade. Bottles clinking against the rocks, girls squealing. Elio stands still in the water, watches me. The moon isn’t full but bright enough to cast a spotlight on the waves and the lights from the promenade create a crown of a prince of his hair. I’m looking at him like one looks at a classic painting in the Louvre: knowing it’s nothing new but it takes your breath away nonetheless.I try to memorize him, to store him for the November months ahead.

He doesn’t move, probably knows what I’m doing. Eventually he crouches and splashes his face with the sea.

“Shall we?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer but pads to dry land and I follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. 
> 
> After this little prologue appetizer, the story will start in earnest **tomorrow** with a full chapter. In Chapter 2, things will begin to make more sense, as we go back in time a couple of days to trace how they got here exactly. 
> 
> All chapters have already been written and I’m so excited to finally share them with you! After tomorrow, there will be weekly updates; welcome aboard <3


	2. First Bloom

**_48 hours earlier_ **

_“Un martini sec.”_

The order placed at the seafront bar of Hotel Westminster was nothing out of the ordinary. On Mondays, as I had learned, the hotel cut off their table service at eight, so people needed to come to the rose trellis-lined bar for their drinks. I’d sat there for hours with mine, so close to the flowers that the meadow honey wafting from them had masked any hints of sea coming from across the promenade.

The patio had been packed earlier, people nibbling on olives and nuts and pink champagne after a day on the beach and before a late dinner in the Old Town, but now, after the sun had set, there were only a few guests left. Like everywhere in Nice, they were mostly French tourists, with the occasional Brit or an American in between.

This latest order for a martini had been placed in French, too, but the man placing it wasn’t simply French. He had an Italian mother, an American father and the last I’d heard, he lived in Paris himself. The dark beard I’d seen eight months ago was gone from his face, and thus, unlike at my lecture hall in New Hampshire, it took me no time to recognize him.

Up until then, my evening had been uneventful to say the least.

The views had been great, the terrace and the hotel were sitting right by the beach, after all. Micol had gasped when she had first stepped onto our balcony and seen the layered view of palm trees and the promenade lining the rocky beach with its rows of colorful umbrellas. Behind them all, the Mediterranean Sea had stolen the show as it beckoned azure blue by day and raven black by night. We had thanked our luck and her editor: we never could’ve afforded to stay here on our own money.

However, between people-watching and nursing my drink and then another, there hadn’t been much for a man with a jet lag to do on the terrace and I had already done the same nothing for three nights in a row. I was just about ready to go back up to join Micol and take another stab at conquering my insomnia, but that all changed when the person I would’ve least expected to see here walked in and wanted a dry martini.

The narrow hips, the lean on the counter as he waited for his drink, and I forgot in an instant that any other place in the world existed. The quickly appearing tight smile, intended as a polite response to whatever the bartender was asking him, and I was transported years back to that summer, back to that little bedroom with French windows.

I had obviously seen him since then, too. First on the Christmas break when I’d told him I was getting married, then last fall when he’d come to see me after a lifetime apart.

The bartender didn’t sense his reluctance and kept him talking, so I got to watch him for a good long while.

Not counting the missing beard, he looked just like he had when he’d shown up at my university. Slim, limbs more refined than restless these days. His hair had long ago grown out of its boyish style. Now it was longer, artistic, European. Perfect for a pianist touring the world. It wouldn’t curl as wildly after a swim anymore but would fall on a pillow like a halo. Or so one could assume.

Last fall, he hadn’t come to stay with us at the house when I had invited him, not even for dinner. He and I had sat at his hotel, close, and felt like we were back in Italy but with a screen of years and a marriage between us that prevented us from fully dipping in.

I had wondered then why he had come. To see if it was over? Over for him, or for me? Maybe it didn’t matter, maybe it only needed to be over for one of us and that would cut the cord.

He fished out bills from his back pocket now with two fingers and a graceful wrist, paid for his drink and searched around with his eyes to decide on a table. I could’ve lifted my hand to get him to make note of me, but I wanted to observe him unnoticed for as long as I could, to let the years and stirred feelings settle before I would have to fold them back in.

He looked at the view, the oscillating Baie des Anges my competitor for his attention, until his eyes landed on me. An unsolicited ghost from the past.

I sat up straighter and ran my hand through my hair and the miniscule confusion of his brows was followed by: “Oliver?”

I nodded and smiled; got up. Tucked in the last ray of longing. Only the gentle happiness of seeing him again was left on view and that wasn’t a lie, either.

“Of all the bars in the world,” he tried and our handshake morphed into him hugging my chest. His head still fit under my chin.

“I didn’t know you would be here,” he said, quite self-explanatory, as we pulled apart and sat down. The thin metal legs of the chairs creaked against the tiles of the patio.

I kept smiling. “I didn’t know you would be here, either. What a surprise!”

“A good surprise?”

“The best. What are you doing here? In Nice.”

“I’m playing here. And tomorrow in Antibes. And then here again. You?”

“Micol is on an assignment for an article and I came with her.”

“Your wife is here?” He looked around.

“Not here. She’s up in our room, sleeping. She has to leave early in the morning, she’s doing another round of interviews. Whereas I get to be a gentleman of leisure for two weeks.”

“Is it? Leisure?”

“Technically yes. I should also be editing my next book but it isn’t going very well, so I’m concentrating on the sightseeing. Not that I’ve done much of that yet, either. Jet lag. Are you staying here, too?” I gestured up at the faded rococo-pink front of the hotel.

“Yes. I just came back from the hills. It was a private event. They invited me to stay for dinner after but I wasn’t in the mood, so I declined. I’m glad I did, now.” He rested his elbows on the table and leaned in, his perfect martini forgotten. “It’s good to see you, Oliver.”

“You too, Elio.” Clearly, we weren’t doing the old ruse. We were two people on separate paths, not one body, one mind.

He nodded and then sat back. Picked up the cocktail napkin and folded it, placed it back on the table again, smoothed the hotel’s gold emblem on it with his thumb. “This is so—” He shook his head, laughed a little to himself. “Is this how you felt when I showed up at your lecture, unannounced?”

“I didn’t even recognize you at first.”

“You were easy to spot. You haven’t changed at all.”

“From last fall?” I asked.

“From that summer.”

“Neither have you.”

“I take mine back. Clearly your eyesight has gone.”

He smiled, teased, but I had meant it. “You haven’t. Not in the ways that matter.”

He shook his head again and laughed, again, but didn’t look at me, remembered his drink now and took a sip. Then came back to not knowing what to say.

I would’ve been happy just looking at him, seeing his face, not needing to talk, but I decided to help him. “Tell me how you’ve been since you left New Hampshire.”

He’d finished his tour in the States and returned to Paris, to his second-story apartment in the heart of the 14th arrondissement. His short tour on the Riviera had started that night, a string of performances at glitzy benefits that would pay for his rent for months to come.

“You should’ve seen the crowd. And the house, a Belle Époque style mansion.”

He was going to be here for four more days.

He spoke and stopped at times, to look at me as if he discovered each time anew that it was really me, really us sitting here, under the Mediterranean skies. _We’ll always have the sea_.

Even though I had wondered at first, by the end of his last visit it had become clear that it hadn’t been over for him yet. But I hadn’t heard a word from him since he’d left, and I didn’t know what his final verdict had been. Maybe the visit had been the last thing he had needed for closure. If there had still been something that night, had it then disappeared, when he’d seen who I’d become, someone with a conventional family at home and sunspots on the hands that once had pleasured him? If it hadn’t been over when he came, was it now?

For me, seeing him in my town had ripped everything open again and the months that had followed hadn’t sewn me back together.

I had always known it wasn’t over for me, and as long as I wanted to keep that framed postcard on my wall, it would never be. The day I would want to take that down, I would know it was over, but that day hadn’t arrived yet.

The bartender, in a lull of customers, made an exception and stopped at our table. Elio’s martini had still plenty in it but he picked up my empty glass.

“Would you like another, sir?”

“Sure.”

“How long have you been here?” Elio asked when another glass of chilled white wine was back in front of me, now full.

“Three days.”

“Are you sleeping?” His sympathetic tone was of someone who’d crossed the ocean back and forth more than once himself.

“No. But don’t they say that the body can adjust for only one hour per day?”

That meant that there was a six-day journey from New Hampshire to Nice and I was only halfway here. The other half of me still hovering somewhere over the Atlantic.

He talked more about his tour and what he would be playing tomorrow, and now I was grateful to him for filling in the silences. I was vaguely aware of the patio around us getting emptier as the night went along, but the roses next to us kept us company. Their scent was strong and I remembered what Micol had taught me when she had first started her rose garden at our summer house.

“Roses smell stronger when they are only half open. That’s when they’re ready to be pollinated. And the first blooms of summer have the most powerful smell, like your first love,” she’d said and lovingly slipped her garden-gloved hand to caress the nape of my neck.

We had never discussed it, but she had assumed. After all, with our entangled on-and-off relationship and a circle of friends so small that everyone knew each other, how would I ever have had time to fall in love with anyone else? Of course she was my first. That's what she had meant.

And that summer sixteen years ago I myself had walked right into the surprise, into the house in Italy, not having a single clue about what would be waiting for me once I got there. Falling for him, trying to stay away, and then realizing the boy would make it all that much harder for me by being interested.

My refilled wine glass stayed full but I was drinking him in as he talked.

In New Hampshire it had been glances and wonder of the surprise, but now our gazes started to settle in on each other. We’d learned how brief these meetings were now, possibly only hours like last time. We didn’t get to have weeks of suspended time, not anymore.

Eventually he dug a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

“Want one?”

He lit it for me. Leaned in and cupped his hand, skin cushioning skin. I hadn’t been this close to his face since that night in his room at Christmas break, when I’d kissed him for the last time.

He lingered, lied that the wind kept getting to it in the standstill of the muggy night. I didn’t gamble anymore, but if I had, I would’ve wagered that it still wasn’t over for him.

Elio had traveled down to the Riviera that morning via Lyon and Marseille, and the late performance had taken its toll. By the time he yawned for the third time, I told him to go to bed. I was going to stay and finish my nearly untouched wine.

“Maybe I'll see you here tomorrow night,” I offered as a consolation. “If you can't sleep after your concert?”

“It's a matinee tomorrow,” he corrected me as he swallowed the last of his martini and got up.

“Oh.” Had I been presumptuous in assuming I wasn’t the only one who had enjoyed our evening? Was he pitying me: _that old fool thinks I would want more time with him_?

“Which means that you won’t have to wait as long,” he said as he stretched his arms, spun around like a teenager and disappeared back into the hotel through the overgrown vines of the entrance.

My first love.

Or, on those rare moments of truth that I allowed myself, my only love.


	3. Matches

Micol’s alarm went off at six-thirty, but I decided to sleep in, through the sounds of her taking a shower, then the blow-dryer being turned on and eventually off. Hangers clacking against each other in the wardrobe as she picked out clothes to wear. A zipper.

I opened my eyes again when I heard her ask: “I didn’t hear you come in last night. Still jet lagged?”

“I—” I had to clear my throat, dry from sleep. “I think so. I don’t know how you do it.”

She buttoned up the last button of her shirt. “I don’t really have a choice. You remember how long it took to arrange for his teacher and the childhood friend to talk to me? I can’t show up tired.”

“I know.”

“You should take the melatonin, too. It’s right there on the desk.”

She kept brushing her hair in front of the mirror until it shone and she tied it to a sleek, low ponytail with a clip.

Everything about her was sleek. Organized. Planned. Her tapes and notes from interviews all marked with dates, subjects, timestamps. Her life proceeded according to a plan, any attempts of diversions were cut at the bud.

She hadn’t known about my diversion until a few months ago. She’d found a receipt from a local hotel bar in my pocket when she was doing laundry. Six martinis after a regular day at work. I hadn’t let Elio pay, he’d been the guest in my town. Keeping the receipt—I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d done that. I certainly couldn’t have framed it like I had done with the postcard.

It wasn’t the mere existence of the receipt that had done it. She had mentioned it over dinner, only in passing and expecting it to land as a funny observation. _You must’ve had a tough day_. I could’ve let it come and go.

Instead, I stopped mid-bite. “Did you throw it away?”

“Yes, I threw it in the trash like I always do. Why?”

“Where?”

“In the laundry room—" Her speech faded away behind me as I dashed from the table, through the hallway and to the laundry room.

She eventually found me standing between the washing machine and the trash can, holding the scrunched up piece of paper with the print half-worn off.

She leaned against the doorframe, waited for me to start but when I didn’t, she had to ask. I could see the boys from the window, playing catch in the yard. She must’ve let them leave the dinner table.

“Are you cheating on me with someone in town?”

“With— No! Why would you say that?”

“Because of that,” she pointed at the receipt, “and because it’s not exactly been busy in our bedroom for a while now.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Would you care to tell me what it is that I think?”

“Whatever it was, it’s in the past. And nothing happened. Just a ghost from the past.”

“It took six drinks to make it go away?”

“Something like that.”

Over the years, she’d never asked about the book, never asked about who was ‘in silence somewhere in Italy in the mid-eighties’, and I sometimes thought about how disappointed Elio would’ve been to hear that. I suspected now that he would’ve been happy about the receipt being found. He’d existed, we’d existed.

Micol had slept with her back to me that night, but the next evening we’d gone to a faculty dinner and when we’d gotten back home, I had assured her again that it was long gone and we had made love, she fueled with the Kir Royales she had had after dinner, and I eyes closed, pushing away the images of misbehaving tendrils, sleek only when wet by the beach, and a small bathing suit clinging to places I was not supposed to look at.

Sleek, that’s who Micol was.

“What are you planning to do today?” she asked as she slipped her heels on and dumped the contents of her handbag onto the king-size bed. I watched as she sifted through her notepads, receipts and gum wrappers, and what survived her scrutiny was then repacked into her bag.

I sat up on my side of the bed and stretched. “Maybe go for a run. Read. I was going to go to the Chagall museum but it’s closed today. I’ll probably do that tomorrow.”

“You do remember that tomorrow’s when I leave for St-Paul-de-Vence? And I won’t be back until Saturday.”

“I remember.”

“And remember to look at those paint chips,” she pointed at the side table where they fanned out in all shades of beige. _How fitting_ , I had thought. Not a color of joy in sight. “We need a decision soon. Martin needs to order the paint next week so that it’ll arrive before we leave for the Cape.”

Still in bed, I watched as she put on her lipstick, blotted her lips with a tissue and applied a second layer of color. Clicked the cap of the lipstick back on with a snap, folded the red-streaked tissue into the trash can. Same routine every morning.

Elio and I met just before sunset. When I got to the terrace bar he wasn’t there yet, and I found myself getting nervous. Trying to read my book, tucking it under my seat, shifting in my chair like a restless teenager, or a man of any age waiting for an important first date. Which was silly, because this wasn’t neither first nor a date.

I chose a table under the awning, just in case Micol would’ve decided to peek out from our balcony. I didn’t really think she would: after her day of interviews in town she had gone to bed earlier than usual, as the car was coming to pick her up before sunrise. The painter living in St-Paul-de-Vence was an eccentric who had demanded that they conduct the interviews at dawn and dusk. She had happily complied, as he was an excellent get for the magazine and writing this profile would be a feather on the cap of her career, too. But there was no point for her to make the trip from Nice to inland and back every morning before dawn and then again at midnight, so she’d found a little auberge in the village.

Earlier, when we’d been planning the trip, I’d offered to join her, but she’d told me to stay in Nice and make use of the four-star hotel that her magazine was paying good money for. I hadn’t put up a fight. I could use the time alone.

I’d been reading in the room when she’d started to get ready for bed. As she was taking off her make-up, swiping her eyes with a cotton ball, I’d told her I didn’t want to ruin her sleep.

“I’ll be down at the bar.” I’d closed the book and waved it, showing her I’d be taking my reading with me. There was nothing going on, so it hadn’t felt like lying.

“Are you planning to do anything else while I’m gone? Other than just sitting in bars? I thought this trip would shake you out of whatever it is that’s been going on with you, but I don’t think it’s working. You seem even more bored than usual.”

“It’s just the jet lag. And I’m going to see the Chagalls tomorrow like I said.”

“I could’ve come here alone, too, you know? I could’ve slept in that bed, not having sex, on my own, too,” she pointed at the pristinely made bed with the cotton ball in her hand.

“Maybe you should’ve, then.”

She reached to touch my cheek. She hadn’t meant to start a fight. “I’m just trying to get you to be interested in something, anything. Are you even looking forward to the Cape?”

We’d planned a renovation for our summer house this year. The house needed a fresh coat of paint and Micol wanted the paths to be rearranged in the garden. Maybe plant a few more roses. _Rosa mai, Rosa cornelia,_ maybe _Rosa gloire de Dijon_. I couldn’t have cared less but then again, the house and garden were her projects, despite me having inherited them from my father. They were her pride and joy, maybe they were easier to prune than me or the kids.

After all, she liked pruning, perfecting. If something was not to her liking, she’d work to change it, piece by piece. Strive towards the image that she had in her head. She’d even changed her name; she hadn’t liked the one her parents had given her so Nicole had become Micol.

Right before sunset, the dome of the neighboring luxury hotel gleamed with the last rays of the sun, blindingly golden for a while and then dull. Elio walked up behind me, surprised me by putting his hands on my shoulders.

“You came.”

“Of course I came. What are you drinking?”

I showed him my drink of choice and he signaled for the waiter that he wanted to order the same.

We discussed my day and how his crowd had been in Antibes today. Even more pompous than the night before. I told him I’d gone for a run, like the old days, and he said he’d run on the promenade, too, and we concluded that we had just missed each other coming and going.

He got his drink and took a sip, much more relaxed than last night. “This is different now that I knew that you’d be here.”

“Like you knew in New Hampshire.” I still wished he would’ve let me know beforehand, let me prepare.

“It was still overwhelming. I didn’t know where to put all those feelings after.” He admitted it outright, and I shouldn’t have been surprised. For all my bravado, he was the bold one.

“Me neither.”

“I thought it was easy for you. You invited me to your house like it was nothing.”

“That’s not why I invited you.”

”Why did you? Or better yet, would you still do it?”

I remembered my conversation with Micol before she had gone to bed. “I could invite you to come to the Chagall museum with me.”

“The Chagall museum? When?”

“I need to come up with something to do for the next few days. Micol is going to St-Paul-de-Vence to do an interview.”

“Is she still writing those profiles?”

I had mentioned it last time, when we’d traded basic facts about where our lives were. “Yes. This one’s a painter, quite a particular guy. He’s holed up in his cottage, requires them there for three days. So will you come? We can make a day of it.”

“Are we ready for that?” he asked, matter-of-factly.

What he meant was, we can make conversation for an hour or two, three even, when we both know it’s only a matter of time before one can stretch and yawn and blame the jet lag or the gruel of the tour and leave. Isn’t it funny, how one always has to come up with a reason to stop the conversation, even though no one expects that the two of you will sit here, or you and an old acquaintance will stand at a street corner, all day and all night, until death arrives? And yet, people need to explain. Find a reason to end the moment.

When he asked if we were ready, what he meant was that yes, we were able to patch ourselves enough to hold everything together in one piece—the past, the present, the feelings, the occasional surge of a throb—for a few hours. But could we manage an entire day? Or worse still, would all of this stand the severity of daylight without dispersing like a sparkle of fireflies? And did we hope that it would, or wouldn’t?

“Friends can spend time with each other.”

“Friends? That’s what we were?” he asked.

“We pretended to be. At the beginning.”

“I liked you as more than a friend from the beginning.”

“I did too.”

“I still do.”

I showed him the book. I wanted to let him know that I’d brought it with me, traveled with it. I’d had the idea that being here with it, by the same sea, would be like he’d be here with me. Now he was here in flesh and the book had worked too well. Had I summoned him, and was now being tested?

“We’re adults. We can behave.”

A platitude; grown-ups were infinitely worse than children. I told him so and wasn’t sure anymore which side of this negotiation I was on.

Then a better suggestion from him: “Maybe it will get it out of our systems.”

I half-believed in it: if we spent a lot of time together, maybe we’d realize that we didn’t, in fact, want each other anymore? We’d longed for a raincheck of a missed chance, but maybe the reality was less rosy. Maybe the beiges of the dawn of my forties would extend to this, too.

“You mean, maybe it’ll get diluted?”

“Yes.”

“That if we spend enough time together, we’ll realize that maybe we don’t really like each other anymore.”

He chuckled. “Maybe.”

The mood was lighter again.

“Maybe after tomorrow you’ll duck out if you peek in and see me sitting here,” I dared. “So will you come?”

“Okay. If you think we can do it.”

“As long as we leave the matches at home.”

“And don’t play with fire?”

“Exactly.”

I did think we could do it, but I needed to hear one more thing from him. “What made you come? To the university.”

He sensed the importance of the question. “What are you doing?”

“Talking. Why did you come?” I asked again.

“I wanted to see you.”

“Why then?”

“Someone made me realize I had to.”

“Someone?”

“I wanted to tell you about him. When I came.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugged, didn’t know.

“Do you still want to?”

He looked at me. “I’m not sure you’d want to hear.”

“If you want to tell me, I’ll listen.” It was the least I could do. I had left, and married, and tried to invite him to my married home. The least I could do.

“It didn’t last long. But in a way, after you there’s only been him. His name was Michel. We spent weekends at his country house. Antique cabinets, thick curtains. Eighteenth century coffee tables.”

I didn’t care about houses. “Did he treat you well?”

Elio nodded. “Too well. But he kept saying I would leave.”

“Why?”

“He was older. He thought I’d want someone else.”

“How much older?”

“Much. Enough that he thought I‘d want someone from my own generation.”

Our seven years were nothing now, but I recognized the same silvery sadness from my past. Wanting to keep him, but knowing you had to let him go and grow. Without you.

“Where is he now?”

“Still in Paris, I think.”

“You don’t see him anymore?”

Elio shook his head. “He said it would be too difficult. To see me move on, have a front row seat to my life with someone else. I understood him,” he finished pointedly, and there was a sting in my guts.

“I didn’t invite you to come and watch my married life. Is that what you think?”

“What was I supposed to think?”

“I wanted to hold onto our time together and I couldn’t think of another option.”

“I could have,” he said and took a sip of his drink but his eyes didn’t leave mine.

_See, so easily playing with fire,_ I thought.

“I told him about you.”

“Michel?”

A pause. “He knew you were to me what I was to him.”

“A scuttler?” I tried, nonetheless, even though his eyes had already said it all.

“Do you need me to say it?”

“Please don’t.” Not because I didn’t want to hear it but because I already knew. He was the same for me, but I couldn’t possibly tell him that while my wife slept upstairs. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

He stretched his leg under the table, and his bare calf brushed against mine but only for a moment. He moved his leg and I controlled my urge to move mine after it.

A pause, and he ran a hand through his hair. “It’s a half-hour walk to the museum. Should we meet down here, say, ten-thirty?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The detail of Micol having changed her name from Nicole comes from a discarded backstory that André Aciman talked about in a _Find Me_ interview.


	4. A Blue That Didn't Exist

No one knew about him. The closest call had been at a Fourth of July get-together ten years ago. One of Micol’s friends had wanted to share first-time stories after everyone’s kids had gone to bed and the reservations had been lowered by the warm summer night, the cases of beer, and the long weekend.

She’d asked about everyone’s first kiss and squealed: “Oliver, based on the look on your face, you have a good story.”

And I didn’t know how my face had looked like, but I hadn’t thought of the girl in a red dress in middle school or even the college party two weeks after Micol and I had met and I’d been twenty-two. I had thought of grass, sun-warmed skin, and tracing a lip with my finger. I’d thought of the heady rush of the knowledge that I could have it all if I just dared to. How the boy’s lips had chased mine. How I’d barely remembered to stop before things went too far.

“Italy,” I’d said as a reflex, but after seeing Micol’s face changing, I’d quickly corrected, “Italian. The girl in middle school, she was Italian.”

And so I told everyone the story about the pushy girl in a red dress, the one Micol already knew about, and we all laughed.

On the morning of our museum visit, Elio was already there, inspecting one of the white marble lions guarding the hotel entrance when I stepped out. Sunglasses, shorts, and a camera bag.

“You’re making us look like tourists.”

He adjusted his sunglasses. “We are tourists.”

He walked half a step in front of me and I watched his profile. We barely spoke, only a few words about the mugginess that had settled over the city like a heavy cape and didn’t seem to have any intention of moving along. It was just about bearable at night but stifling during the day; the asphalt softening under our feet and the air vibrating in the distance at the end of every street.

“Did you get any sleep now?” Elio asked when we stopped at a traffic lights.

“Yes, a little.” When I’d gotten to my room, I’d taken the melatonin Micol had pushed on me earlier.

A little before dawn, she had gotten ready to leave, and I had promised her that I’d at least go to the Chagall museum while she’d be gone. She had blotted her lips again in the near-dark, done her whole routine before the sun was up, and worried that she was going to be late to meet the photographer who was picking her up.

“He was there yesterday too, very charming, very French. But intense. I don’t want to make him wait.”

I knew Elio would still be fast asleep, but I wondered if he had a morning routine these days. I didn’t know any of his routines now, but I did once. How in the afternoons, half an hour after lunch he'd fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, always on his left side, and I would have to be on my right if I wanted to watch him. He would wake up with his mouth open on the pillow and lips dry. He might still do that.

The museum didn’t allow photography, so Elio needed a locker for his camera. He picked one on the very top row and stretched, the undersides of his arms still white and smooth. The summer was so young that it hadn’t gotten to them yet.

I picked up a brochure along with our tickets from the booth, but as we began to meander our way through the first exhibition room, I quickly found out that my companion knew far more interesting things than what was printed in the brochure.

Moishe Shagal was a Jewish man who had come from Russia to Europe in search of artistic light and liberation. After arriving in Paris, he’d painted new versions of the works he’d already done in his home town and thus had reinvented himself for the new circumstances. And voilà, Marc Chagall had been born.

However, none of that was a match for:

“He ate half a herring a day.”

Or, “After his wife died, he had an affair with a woman 28 years younger than him, until she left him for a photographer.”

Or, “He never learned English, even though they fled the World War II to New York for six years. His granddaughter still has a flower shop in Manhattan, by the way. In the East Village.”

I watched Elio inspect Chagall’s _Three Angels_ dangling their feet while they sat by the feast that Abraham had set to them. Brilliant reds, blinding white wings.

“How do you know all this?”

“I knew a painter once. He was obsessed with Chagall.” He offered no detail, but pursed his lips and moved onto the next painting.

“Knew?” I asked.

“We lived together.”

He looked uncomfortable so I assured him. And myself. “We can talk about these things.”

“Can we?” It was a rhetorical question.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that he’d been with others, but being faced with the evidence and the stories was another matter. Sobering. Had this painter loved Elio? And Elio him?

And that Parisian man he had mentioned the night before, Michel. How had they met? Had they played the same game where they both were the cat and the mouse? I didn’t want to think of him having the first fluttering kiss with anyone, but they must have. Had the man taken the first step? Or Elio, having learned that seizing the moment was better than wasting so many weeks when weeks is all one might have. Had he thought that he would do better with others, fix everything that we’d done wrong?

The next room was a smaller, hexagonal-shaped space with five illustrations on the Song of Songs, all blushing in vivid reds. Chagall didn’t shy away from colors or love.

“He also painted the ceiling for the Opèra Garnier in Paris,” I read from the brochure.

“Yes. It’s filled with illustrations and scenes from different operas.”

“Have you seen them?”

Elio nodded. “I’ve been there a couple of times.”

“With that Michel?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really,” I said and thought about him all dressed up, having been taken to the opera by someone who might steal a clandestine hold of his hand when the lights had gone down.

“The section with Daphnis and Chloé is my favorite. He painted them as one being with two heads, one at each end. Maybe I get to show it to you, if you come to Paris some time.”

“Maybe.” I looked at the brush strokes of the painting now in front of us, the rust turning gradually to burgundy and then light pink. The lovers eye level with angels. “Although I don’t even know where you live, exactly.”

“I’ll give you my address.”

“The Metropolitan Opera House also has Chagall’s frescoes. Maybe we can go to New York next time you come to the States. Do a world tour of opera houses.”

He smiled. Here we were, making plans like friends. We could do this.

The last room of the museum boasted a real, full-size harpsichord as its centerpiece. The lid was up and on the inside, there was a painting.

“ _The meeting of Isaac and Rebecca_ ,” I read from the plaque. “So the biblical theme continues.”

“It was love at first sight when he met his first wife Bella.” Elio turned to look at me and recited by heart: _“It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me._ That’s from his autobiography.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“She wrote about his eyes, in turn. _As blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky_.” Elio cleared his throat and looked at the harpsichord again. “He had to convince her family that he, a poor artist, was worth their daughter. But she was his muse. A lot of his paintings show him and Bella, flying over cities.”

“Nothing says love quite like defying gravity, right?”

“Right.”

Elio grinned, and we’d successfully skipped over the momentary heaviness.

“You see those instruments surrounding them?” Elio pointed at the violin-playing villagers drawn in blue on the light background. “Music was important to him. He listened to Bach and Mozart when he painted. When he was young, he also painted naked so that he didn’t have to waste time or money on washing clothes.”

“You know I will have to ask, right? Or maybe you wanted me to,” I teased.

Elio laughed. “No, I didn’t do the same.”

“Not even in your poor artist phase?”

“I’m still in my poor artist phase, mind you. Which explains why I agreed to do these concerts even thought I probably shouldn’t have.”

“Why not? What’s wrong with the concerts?”

“No, the concerts are okay. They are good. But the man who got me the job, he’s the father of one of my students. He and his wife divorced earlier this year—the daughter only wanted to play Chopin’s _Ètudes_ for a while.”

“And?” I still failed to see the connection.

“He keeps flirting with me when he picks up his daughter after her lessons.”

An unpleasant weight turned in my stomach. “And do you flirt back?”

“Sometimes. To be polite. He’s not terrible. He’s patient and kind with his daughter. And sometimes funny.”

Was that what Elio was looking for these days, funny? I liked to think I had my moments but it wasn’t the first thing people described me as. Smart, yes. Accomplished, good looks, sometimes. Rarely funny.

“Would you—consider him?” The words were thick in my mouth.

He shook his head. “No.”

“You’re not interested? He sounds like he’s a— I don’t know, a prospect.”

“A prospect?” Elio scoffed at my choice of the word.

“Funny and kind. Has money and connections.” _Is available._

“What are you trying to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Anyway, I’m not interested. So I probably shouldn’t have encouraged him by accepting this job of playing for his friends in their mansions, but I wanted the pay. Let’s move on.”

I waited outside while Elio went to get his camera back. On the west side of the museum, there was a mural by Chagall on the outer wall and a reflecting pool that echoed the colors and shapes.

Chagall had been here to open the museum, had had a say in the arrangement of the paintings, seen how the sun hit the mirrored image of his mosaic work in the water. He’d also had an exhibition in the Louvre while he was still alive. That was rare, usually the greatness of artists was only recognized long after they were gone. He’d been able to answer questions about his works, provide explanations for his inspiration. I envied the scholars who’d been his contemporaries, and wondered if Heraclitus had had any idea that his words would carry through millennia and be translated and studied by thousands and thousands of people. If, when asked, he would have remembered where he had come up with each line and why.

When I had returned to the States and started revising my first book, each section had brought me back to when and where it had first been drafted. That paragraph right there: that was written on the morning Elio had first come to sit with me in the garden. This other one came after the evening when we’d gone swimming together and he’d invited the others to come along, and I’d realized I’d been disappointed when they showed up. And then there was the line, that one single line that was all I had managed on the afternoon when we had translated Leopardi together and he had blushed and I had realized for the first time that I wasn’t alone in my turmoil.

I was brought back to this world by the click of a shutter.

Elio stood on the step, holding his camera. “It’s going to be a good one. You, the reflection.” He nodded at the pool.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll send you the picture.”

We had lunch back in town, on Rue Massena. The peace of the museum was no longer as we were surrounded by shoppers, tourists, and locals on their lunch breaks. Our table was in the direct glare of the sun and after the walk back from the hill that the museum had sat on, my shirt stuck to the skin on my back.

“But it was worth it,” I said. “The paintings were stunning. The colors, the light.”

“Picasso said that no one understands color like Chagall. Well, after Matisse died, but anyway. Colors were even how a forging of his work was proven fake.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The forger had used pigments that didn’t exist when Chagall was creating his works. Too new. Can you imagine, a newly invented blue? A color that didn't exist before, not for Chagall, or Bach, or your Heraclitus.”

I think of all the colors that didn't exist for me before I met him, but ask: “Yves Klein invented and patented his own blue, didn’t he?”

“Sort of. He registered the invention in France, but never fully patented it.”

“Ah.”

“Did you know that he once brought eleven identical monochrome blue works to an exhibit? And priced them all differently. Buyers were supposed to be drawn to something in each painting that the others couldn’t see.”

I was quiet, wondered how there was so much information in that head of his.

“I can see you’re about to ask and yes, the answer is still the same.”

“Right.” The painter boyfriend.

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about the others,” he suggested.

“Curiosity did kill the cat, as we all know.”

“But at the same time, I want to know. What is that about?” he pondered.

“Truth can never be as shocking as what your imagination can conjure?” I suggested.

He took a big gulp of his water. “You and Micol. How did you meet?”

“College.”

“Love at first sight?”

I felt queasy, a mixture of talking to him about this and the head-on heat of the sun. “Not really. Friends first. There was a group of us. Still is.”

“And your first time?”

“Really, Elio?”

“I want to desensitize myself.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. If you ever want me to be able to come for dinner.”

“Okay.” I watched him. “In her dorm room, after a date at Arrigo’s. We used to go there every—“

“No, stop.”

“What?”

“Stop, I take it back. I don’t want to hear it. I thought I could but I can’t.” He stuffed his mouth with the leafy greens from his salad, not upset, but rather laughing at himself for having been so wrong about thinking he could take it.

I wanted to change the subject.

I wiped my mouth on the napkin, already done with my soup. “So. What’s next?”

“It’s getting so hot that I think I need an afternoon nap. What do you think?”

My mind rushed faster than I could catch it. The gauzy curtains, him sleeping on his side and me watching him, rather than taking the opportunity to rest. Him waking up after an hour or so, checking the time and listening for sounds to find out whether the house was blissfully empty or whether we’d need to go downstairs again, so as not to cause suspicion.

I swallowed and opened my mouth to ask but he got there first. “Not together, silly. You should see your face.”

He rolled his eyes and I laughed, relieved and embarrassed. Empty, too. Those days were over. Our excursion today was also over.

He licked the tines of his fork clean before placing it on the plate for the final time and signaling the waiter for the check. While we waited, a pigeon meandered on the sidewalk in front of us, trying to evade the busy pedestrians. We watched the bird dart between feet and shopping bags, saving itself from one or two baby strollers. When it finally found a clearing and took flight, Elio turned to me and broke the silence.

“But we both still need to eat dinner later, don’t we?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s a selection of links for those who might be interested in the details:
> 
> [Abraham and the Three Angels](https://www.encirclephotos.com/image/marc-chagalls-painting-abraham-and-the-three-angels-in-nice-france/) (Marc Chagall, 1960) and [The Prophet Elijah mosaic](https://www.cotedazur-card.com/photos/Photo-CACPAC0060000140-9.jpg) (Marc Chagall, 1970) in the Marc Chagall National Museum in Nice.
> 
> [Daphnis and Chloé](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/4th-series-of-panels/RwHNmMsONyvObQ?childAssetId=lQEpLvjLwTiaLA), depicted as a figure with two heads and no legs on the red background, on the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier in Paris (Marc Chagall, 1964).
> 
> [The Meeting of Isaac and Rebecca](https://www.wikiart.org/en/marc-chagall/lid-meeting-of-isaac-and-rebecca-1980) (Marc Chagall, 1980) painted on the inside of the lid of a harpsichord.
> 
> An [_Applied Physics A_ article](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00339-016-9644-3) describing the identification of the modern, synthetic phthalocyanine pigments in a purported Chagall painting that was thus proven to be a forgery. (In real life, this analysis was conducted in London in 2013–2014, while this story is set in 2003.)
> 
> Yves Klein’s [Proposition Monochrome/Blue Epoch exhibit](http://www.yvesklein.com/en/expositions/view/1151/yves-klein-proposte-monocrome-epoqua-blu/) (Milan, 1957).


	5. Truth or Dare

“This wine is terrible,” Elio whispered when the waiter was out of earshot. “But pour me some more.”

We were in the Old Town, on a square littered with tiny restaurants and no one was eating inside but the outdoor tables were taken up to the last seat. Couples came by asking for a table and were turned away by the busy waiters, told to come back in an hour or two, maybe. No one knew when there’d be availability, people might be sitting here all night. Time had lost its meaning as the golden hour bathed the square and all of us lucky souls out tonight enjoying it.

Elio perused the menu, brows knitting together and lip disappearing between his teeth as he pondered his choices. How many faces he had, this one full of concentration, the others of mirth and pure joy, and then my favorite, the one where his eyes sparkled with temptation and barely disguised mischief.

The air was so humid it condensed into pearls against the cold glass of the wine bottle. The ice meant to keep the wine cold melted in the bucket in front of our eyes, and everything stuck to the skin on our arms. The space under the rickety table was cramped and our feet kept colliding until Elio rested one of his ankles against mine and seemed like he had no intention of moving it anymore. What was the use, anyway?

“Is this okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “Not the worst thing we’ve done with them.”

He blushed. It started from a blotch and spread up his neck so I knew it wasn’t just the wine, which had already decorated the apples of his cheeks with a flush. His thick eyebrows, approaching each other in the middle, fought to stay still to disguise that my words had had any effect on him, but his neck didn’t lie.

It might’ve been that moment, or the moment when our appetizers came and we tried to coax the escargots out their shells and I dropped one, still in its shell, onto the cobblestones and when the poor thing rolled all the way under the neighboring table, Elio laughed so hard that he almost knocked his own pan off of the table.

Or the moment when he then dried his eyes and looked at me like he wouldn’t have wanted to share this joke with anyone else.

Either way, there was a moment when I decided I would open the gates and spend it all tonight. Just one night, throw it in the wind. Flirt, make him blush, I still knew how to do it, I still got it, it was all harmless. It wouldn’t lead to anything, we knew this was just play-acting. We would get it all out of our systems and feel lighter after.

That was the plan. In reality, our escargots came and went and we had flushed them down with the first bottle of the rosé. Elio ordered a second one of the same.

“It grows on you,” he reasoned and kicked me under the table when I tried to mock him.

Our orders of the main course, the truffle pasta dish, had taken a wrong turn in the kitchen as we were only brought one portion.

The waiter apologized but it felt more like an afterthought and we ate from the single plate while we waited for the missing one to arrive. The second bottle of wine was being consumed just as quickly as the first had been, and the smoother it felt in my veins, the more our surroundings began to blend into a mere whirring backdrop. All the better for all my senses to focus on the face that was the most dearest to me.

Elio sucked on the strands of tagliatelle from his side of the plate and as some of the cream sauce ended up at the tip of his nose, I started to fear that while I hadn’t been looking—while he’d distracted me all day with stories about herrings and pigments and bad wine—I’d fallen even deeper for him than I’d ever been.

How was that even possible? I thought he’d already monopolized that part of my heart, leaving only fondness and prosaic partnership available to Micol. And now he’d gone and seeped further, taking over my organs one at a time until my limbs wanted to reach towards him like a plant looking for sun, until my brain was useless for any other thoughts than him laughing so much that wine burst out between his lips, him drawing absent circles on the table cloth as he spoke, him in front of me, him, him, him.

I knew I was drunk.

But I was helpless, unarmed in front of him.

He probably thought I was responsible for us, for leaving, for pushing us onto our separate paths. I had done it all for him, I had married and tied myself to Micol because otherwise the tether would have pulled me right back to him. And he never would’ve seen who he was without me. I wanted him to know who he was, we were so intertwined and absorbed into each other’s bodies that I couldn’t have forgiven myself if I had taken it all, all that he offered, before he was even whole himself.

I had only been able to go back that Christmas break because I had had a reason to leave. Because otherwise, knowing how hard the mere four months away from him had been, I would’ve chained myself to him, to his bed, to that house. I had only been able to return because I had known how to make myself leave after.

And yet, he thought I held the cards.

The raspberries from his dessert panna cotta smudged his lip and I tried to show him where it was but ended up reaching over.

"You’re such a messy eater. Can I?"

He nodded and stayed very still as I rubbed at the stain with the pad of my thumb. It came off easily, too easily.

I wiped my thumb on the napkin and he looked up. "I'm good now?"

"You're good." _And divinely beautiful in this light._

When the check arrived, we argued playfully over who would get to pay it. Elio insisted on a match of rock-paper-scissors.

“One, two, three—"

I won the first two out of three, and Elio insisted on a rematch.

I won that, too.

“This is not fair,” Elio cried and leaned back in his chair as he admitted defeat.

I laughed and reached for my wallet. “It’s easy. If someone loses with scissors, they’re more likely to go for paper next. And if they’ve just lost with a rock, they’ll choose scissors.”

“I’m trying to follow but that last bottle of the rosé may have been too much.”

“It’s psychology. And if a person wins with paper, they are more likely to keep using paper in the next round, too. So then you should, obviously, go with scissors to win.”

“You’ll need to tell me all of this again when I’m sober. How do you even know all this?”

“My older son read up on it. He uses it on his brother all the time,” I said and smoothed the bills on the table, placed a water glass on top. 

“He’ll be an academic like you, won’t he?”

I smiled. “Maybe.”

“Smart, charming everyone in their lecture halls and outside of them. Like someone I know.”

“Stop flirting,” I teased him but wished he wouldn’t. I had been throwing kindling into the fire myself, but this was harmless and it would get it all out of my system.

“I’m not,” he said, eyes all innocent and leaned in over the table, touched my wrist and we both let his finger stay there until the waiter came.

It was his idea, to go down to the beach on our way back. The private areas were closed for the night but the public stretch of the rocky beach was populated with people sitting in groups and a lone fisherman had settled in a folding chair at the waterline.

Elio glanced at me and flashed an impish smile before running ahead of me and throwing off his shoes on the way. I went after him, picked up his shoes like they’d been my son’s and laughed as he made a splash running into the water.

They say that one shouldn't trust anyone who doesn't kiss with their eyes closed. But sometimes I had wanted to watch: see his lids fall in preparation, see the perfect imperfections on his cheekbones up close. The shadows of my face falling on his, him surrendering to my possession for the duration of the kiss.

Because he was only mine when he was pressed against me. On me. Inside me. After, he would be his own entity again, twirling across the hallways and lawns. My heart in his back pocket.

The way he’s doing it now, playing in the water. He kicks it and it splashes all the way to my shins, coaxesme to leave my shoes and join him in the shallow waves. The sea is warm from the day but it still cools my ankles when I wade in. The rocks are smoother there than on the beach, but they roll and move under our feet and he stumbles. I catch him and balance myself better than he does, I always have, but it’s all a façade. People think I’m patient and controlled but it’s only because I am either on or off, all or nothing. I couldn’t have a taste of him without wanting to swallow him whole, so I denied myself completely. Until I didn’t. The storm brewing until it reached critical mass.

When he came to the university, it wouldn’t have taken long. I sometimes played with the thought of how much longer we would’ve needed to sit in that booth before we would’ve surrendered to what was still happening between us. Five more minutes? Ten?

The voices from the beach become more erratic, the early evening revelers giving way to the younger crowdon their way to the nightclub on the seaside promenade. Bottles clinking against the rocks, girls squealing. Elio stands still in the water, watches me. The moon isn’t full but bright enough to cast a spotlight on the waves and the lights from the promenade create a crown of a prince of his hair. I’m looking at him like one looks at a classic painting in the Louvre: knowing it’s nothing new but it takes your breath away nonetheless.I try to memorize him, to store him for the November months ahead.

He doesn’t move, probably knows what I’m doing. Eventually he crouches and splashes his face with the sea.

“Shall we?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer but pads to dry land and I follow.

We take a different route back, through the side streets that make our walk twice as long but neither of us mentions it.

"Let’s play another game,” he says and rattles his fingers along the laurel hedge lining the sidewalk. “Truth or dare?"

"Truth," I choose, not thinking much of it. I study the ornamental white balconies of the building we’re passing. Only one room has its lights still on.

Elio laughs a little, voice creaking, then shakes his head. "No." He tries again. "Truth or dare?"

"Truth,” I repeat, confused.

He smiles gently and insists, stretching the single syllable. "No."

I begin to catch on as his eyes crawl down from mine, over my nose and over the tops of my cheeks. “Truth,” they settle in around my mouth, determined: “—or dare.”

His words distill the evening’s light, bouncing flutter of desire into heavy want in a millisecond. But this was not part of the plan.

My lips are dry all of a sudden.

"Elio."

The warning in my tone doesn’t deter him and his gaze remains steady. “Choose.”

“Elio,” I repeat. “I don’t like this game.”

His shoulders slump as he spins around, gives up. “Come on.”

“This wasn’t part of the deal,” I remind him. "We can't. I can't."

He rolls his eyes. “Who's going to know?”

"I am."

"And?" 

_I would starve and lose my mind because I would think of nothing but that kiss for the rest of my life_ , I think, but say instead: "I couldn't live with myself."

“I can do it,” he says. “You don’t have to do a thing. Besides, it’s just a kiss. People do it all the time. It’s meaningless.”

“When it comes to us, nothing’s meaningless.”

“One more drink?” he suggests when we reach the hotel next to ours. Their terrace bar is still open. I don’t argue with him, I want to prolong this evening for as long as we can.

We settle for two shots of calvados and he sits across from me an entire table’s width away. Too far.

”I do miss you,” I say and it doesn’t make sense.

The amused confusion is reflected in his smile as he leans back. ”I’m here.”

“I know. But I miss you. Us. Me.” There’s no one who could hear us. “I miss kissing you.”

“I offered—” he says breezily, enjoying this, being the one not begging.

“I know, but I don’t want that, you, for just one night.”

“We didn’t have a forever then, either.”

He’s right, of course. But having him and leaving him, how many more times could I do it?

“Would you like a forever?” he asks.

To someone else, that would be a watershed question, but for us it can only be a rhetorical one. A hypothetical.

I, of course, can’t answer.

He changes tack. ”Are you going for a run tomorrow?”

“I was planning to, yes.”

“Would you like to go together? I’d like to show you something. It’s about two miles from here.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll see. It’s more about getting there than what’s actually there,” he says and seems to laugh at a private joke. Shakes his head, still smiling. “Never mind.”

The calvados is finished too soon. We should’ve gone with wine. Elio looks at our empty glasses and neither of our whirling minds can come up with a plausible reason to stay, so he shrugs. “Okay. I’ll just go to the bathroom first, and then we can leave.”

He disappears inside and I let the waiter clear our table while he’s gone, then decide to use the bathroom myself, too.

There’s only one of them in the hallway off the lobby and it’s locked. I wait by the door and trace the exotic golden print of the wallpaper with my eyes. Tigers, palm trees. Large, strange-looking leaves. I hear the water running, the tap being turned off.

Elio opens the door.

He doesn’t seem surprised that I’m there and maybe I’m not, either. He stands in the doorway, hand on the door handle and waits, and just as he’s about to step out of the bathroom I move and push him back in.

There have been times when I’ve known that I was doing the wrong thing, and yet it has been the only thing left to do. I touched his lip first, waited for him at midnight. He’s always placed the cat on the table but I’ve been the one to stroke it.

I close the door behind us, the lock clicks and I lean against it. Elio’s hands are on my cheeks and his breath pools on my skin, the tip of his nose pressing against the side of mine. His lips open and persuade mine to do so, too, just a little so that he can take my upper lip between his, then more, and I let him kiss me and put his tongue in my mouth and I make note of the moment when I start to kiss him back.

We get to his door first. Third floor, next to the elevator and stairs.

Neither of us tried for more in the bathroom. He relaxed against me after the kiss, lax, my fingertips scraping his back. He left and waited outside, letting me go to the bathroom on my own, but when we walked the last block to our hotel, he preened like a cat.

At the door, he shifts his weight from one foot to another and suggests as a last resort: “Would you want to come in?”

The deceitful calvados softens me and I close him into my embrace. “You know I can’t.”

He molds against me, arms looping around my neck. Never rigid, always trusting.

I want him, there’s no question about that and never has been. The weight of his body against my chest chips away at my resolve and I give him the words, because that’s all I can do.

“But I would if I could.”

“Yeah?”

“But we both know what would happen.”

The elevator chimes and other late-night strangers come out. They wish us good night as they pass us by. I both curse and bless them for interrupting us, but it gives me the strength to pull away.

“Goodnight, Elio,” I say from a safe distance. “And we’ll go for the run in the morning?”

He nods. “Don’t be late.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the truth-or-dare dialogue riffs on a scene from the film _Birdman_ (2014).


	6. Sub Rosa

We run west along the promenade. The sea is a glittering morning glory blue by our side, bright and benign compared to last night when it had been ready to swallow all of our secrets and longings into its darkness.

Elio and I don’t talk about last night and what it had revealed. Not that there had been much to reveal—going to bed, I had figured out why his game had been rigged: he had no use for the truth because he already had it. Thus, there’s no need now to talk about what happened at the end of the night, and the guilt should gnaw at me but I’m under the spell of this dimension where we are together by the sea and still lovers. I am, again and for the first time, me.

Yet, the reality doesn’t loom very far:

“Micol called this morning,” I say, grateful for the fact that Elio and I are running next to each other and I don’t have to look at him while I say this. “After they were done with their interview at dawn.”

They’d had a productive day, the painter had started to warm up to the magazine’s team of her and the photographer. She’d asked me about the museum and whether I’d chosen the paint for the cottage yet.

“Right,” Elio says to say something, whereas the silence that follows asks _why are you telling me all this._ “This may seem like a stupid question, but are you happy?”

He places the obvious elaboration, _with her_ , in between the words, or maybe he didn’t and I just thought that it belongs there.

“We’re a team. She keeps everything running perfectly.”

“Sounds romantic.”

“She asked if I’d enjoyed the Chagalls.”

“Had you?”

“Yes.”

At least that hadn’t been a lie.

I don’t like lying to her. I don’t do it much—except for the dinner at her friends’ house that I couldn’t make it to because of a made-up extra class at work. Or all the reasons I have come up with to explain why I’ve been distant the past few months. Or the receipt for the six martinis.

Elio seems to have read my mind and tries to ease my conscience. “Weren’t you with her that summer, too?”

“We’d been on and off. Mostly off. I wasn’t cheating on her with you.”

“Or with the others,” he adds.

“There were no others,” I remind him. “Just you.”

He looks just as pleased now as when I first told him that, sixteen years ago on a rock.

After about a mile, we cross the promenade and begin our trek up a hill in the rising temperatures of the sunny morning. Narrow serpentine streets turn in steep curves left and then right, all the way up, until we are facing a large, unassuming administrative building with light peach paneling.

_The Faculty of Law, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis_ , the sign says.

Elio stops at the gate with his hands on his hips; pants after the uphill climb. “Shall we go in? I want to show you something.”

I’m puzzled.

“Trust me,” he says and leads the way.

Smatterings of students are coming and going and nobody pays any mind to us, two men in running shorts. Elio takes us to the main building, where we make a swift turn to our right and we have arrived.

It’s a well over thirty-feet wide mosaic, an unmistakable Chagall.

“ _The Message of Ulysses_ ,” Elio says. “The dean of the faculty ordered this from him in the late sixties.”

In Rome, Elio had taken me to Basilica di San Clemente, the church that had been destroyed and rebuilt time and time again. Each new version constructed on top of its ruins. Nothing had gone to waste, only built differently.

The basilica was what it was because of what it had lost and he’d known that that’s what we’d become, too.

Now here, we’re looking at the crushed tiles of the mosaic coming together to form Odysseus’ journey: the assembly of the gods on Olympus, the love-that-never-was with Nausicaa. The temptations posed by Calypso and Circe and the Sirens, and finally the arrival in Ithaca and Penelope’s wedding bed with the olive tree for a leg.

The long journey that was his fate more than the destination had been, each stretch of road having made him who he was: a wise ruler once he finally arrived at his kingdom.

_We wasted so many days_ , Elio had said to me once.

But maybe those early days were needed, to see if we could survive through that summer without each other. Maybe these years haven’t gone to waste, either; maybe we needed to find out that despite trying, life isn’t the same without the other in it.

A life wasted—that’s been on my mind a lot. But would we have had this certainty about each other then, in a different time and in a different world? I’ve tried to ask for his forgiveness, but each time he says there’s no need. Maybe he’s figured this out sooner than I did, that clever boy.

In the hallway of the Faculty of Law in Nice, a rock that’s molded across my shoulders over the years rolls off and makes my body lighter. I look at my tour guide, a curl plastered on his forehead after the run, and smile.

Before our run back, we sit outside for a while, in the small garden behind the campus library. There’s a fountain and two benches, we pick the one in the shade of a rose bush.

My laugh bellows in the garden and Elio doesn’t know why I’m so happy. I don’t quite either, but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this way. Too long. Elio giggles at my joy, the sound chiming and melodic and when it starts to settle I want to hear more of it. I squeeze him below his ribs and he almost falls off of the bench in surprise, still laughing and I pull him back. Reluctantly, I let go of his arm after.

He’s panting from the laughing and we’re smiling and why can’t this be the world, right here? Just this bench, his eyes, that curve of a smile, his sun-warmed knee pressing against mine.

The sun is approaching its high point and the air doesn’t move.

“Suppose I had stayed,” I say. “That night, when you refused to come for dinner.”

He takes himself back to that night, how we’d said our goodbyes by the car, not knowing if we’d ever see each other again but suspecting that one of us would find an excuse, one day, sooner or later. “Yes.”

“Supposed I had stayed at the hotel. How would that have gone?”

“Would you have ever left?”

“Probably not.”

“And now?”

“We wouldn’t be here.”

“Where would we be?”

“At your apartment. At our apartment. At the villa. Anywhere but under these roses,” I say and look up at the rambling bursts of pink above us.

“ _Sub rosa_ ,” he says and I think of the Roman bacchanals where roses were hung on the ceiling as a sign that what happened under the petals was to be kept in silence. The ancient peoples’ version of ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ _._

Maybe this is a sign. A sign to come out with it and hope that it lifts the final burden; we’ve tried everything else, after all.

"My heart, it's yours," I say. “I left it there, on my side of the two beds we'd pushed together, or maybe on your side. It never came to the States with me. I don't know what you did with it, but I don’t think I’ve seen it since myself.”

He misses no beats. “I told you once I worshipped you. I still do. I probably shouldn’t say it, but I do.” He looks at the sun trickling in between the petals, closes his eyes.

My heart bursts. Why were we given this, and then all those years and times apart where we entangled ourselves with others so properly that this seems now right and impossible at the same time?

I rest my face in my hands. “Shouldn’t all this lose its power, year by year? Isn’t that how the human mind works? That the memories become less, not more.”

“Maybe it’s just because we are here now. With each other.”

I look at him and shake my head. “It isn’t just that.”

I tell him about the Novembers, of the days where our parallel life lives and how they are harder for me to descend from each year. Pain needs a place, otherwise it wanders, and mine lives in November. Only on those days, on his birthdays, I let myself bask in what could have been.

He’s moved. He takes my hand and even though there are no other people in the garden, we’re still in public. “Mine isn’t a specific day. I never know where it comes from. Sometimes, on a beach. A straw hat and a back covered with a blue billowy shirt. Or when a student wants to play Bach’s _Capriccio_.”

“I hear you, on those days.”

“What do I say?”

“ _I’m here_. That’s what you say: _I’m here_.”

“I am.”

It’s the roses above us, hanging from their tree ceiling. You can say things that are supposed to stay here on this bench, I tell myself. They won’t haunt us later. “I’ve thought about a forever, for us. About coming back. I’ve also thought I was crazy—”

He squeezes my hand tighter.

“—but you’re in my ruins and I’ve built myself on top of that. What would we be without each other, without these paths that we chose and based everything else on?”

“It all opened my eyes,” he says. “My mother had read me those fairytales, where the prince just knew, when he’d met the right princess. And you, us, I thought this was it. This is it, this is what they talk about. It was the first time I’d ever felt that, and it just slotted into place. That’s how it was supposed to be.” He takes a breath. “And then it wasn’t, not for you.”

“I didn’t choose her in spite of you. I did it because of you, because of what we had.”

“I should be offended by that, right?”

I’m not sure he understands. “I needed to marry her, or otherwise I would’ve come back. I didn’t know how to be away from you, but I needed to learn. Tying myself to her helped.”

He holds my hand for a while and then gradually lets go, when he senses that he’s not going to get more out of me.

“We really should get going or I’m going to be late.” He gets up and straightens his shorts. “I’m not really looking forward to today, though.”

“You’re not? Why?”

“The man I told you about, the one who got me these shows? He’s going to be there today.”

“Oh.”

“I hope he’s with someone. Or at least doesn’t try anything. I’d like to keep his daughter as a student. But are you free for dinner after?”

“Micol isn’t coming back until Saturday. So yes.”

“How does eight o’clock sound?”

“Perfect.”

There’s no shade on the way back, the sun radiating from the asphalt of the promenade, and back at the hotel we’ve both sweated through our clothes. While Elio goes to prepare for his concert, I go to take a shower, maybe try and work on my manuscript after.

The maid has been in the room and moved things around again, the paint chips were on the side table yesterday but now the stack is neatly arranged on the corner of the dresser. I peel off my soaked shirt and shorts and bunch them up on the dresser; they hit the paint chips and make them fall onto the floor like dominoes.

I really should take a look at them at some point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [_The Message of Ulysses_](http://espacesuns.unice.fr/trotabas/salle-des-pas-perdus) (Marc Chagall, 1968) at the University of Côte d’Azur, previously known as the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. 
> 
> There’s an angstier chapter coming up next week, so brace yourselves <3


	7. Pale Oak

I take my time under the cool spray of the shower.

Wash my hair with the hotel’s shampoo that has a sharp note to it that I haven’t figured out yet; scrub my body with the fancy soap Micol has left here. More cool water. Step out and collect a towel from the rack—it’s warm, almost too warm in the steam of the bathroom.

Shave, wear my cologne. There’s verbena in it and once upon a time, Elio liked that a lot. He also liked it when at the end of the day, my stubble had started coming in. Would gently run his fingers, then lips against it. Liked how the prickliness of it made it all seem more real and when it had made his skin pink, it was a memento of what we’d done.

I stroke my jaw, now smooth. Maybe I shouldn’t have shaved.

Back in the room, I pick up the fallen paint chips from the floor, sit on the bed and fan them out. They slip in my damp hands: _Grecian Ivory, Chanterelle Beige, Coastal Beige, Shiitake, Pale Oak_.

I can’t tell them apart.

Our house on Cape Cod will be one of these colors this summer and we’ll have to bribe the boys to leave their video games alone, if we want to get them to help us with the painting. Last time the cottage needed painting, they were so little that it was hard to keep them away. Micol chased them around the yard and there was paint all over the three of them.

So much has changed since then. They will both be away at school this fall. The house will be empty, save for me and Micol. Only companionship left but we’ll pretend we are fine with it. We are good at pretending, Nicole and I.

Besides, I can drink from the well tonight, pretend that this is my life and my sage-eyed husband, from the first glass of wine till the end of dessert. I can slip my foot out of my shoe under the table, rest the sole on top of his. _Who’s going to know,_ like Elio said.

I look at the chips again.

Their proper tones stare at me, whispering whether it’s really going to be just dinner.

“ _This is Elio’s last night here. Are you really going to say goodnight to him in the elevator and let him go?_ ”

“Come on. There’s two of us,” I tell the Grecian Ivory. “Even if I lost control, I wouldn’t get very far.”

 _“But isn’t he just as gone as you are?”_ chimes in the Pale Oak. _“You really think he’s going to make the two of you stop yourselves?”_

 _“Don’t pretend you haven’t gone to bed every night this week wondering whether the dimple on the curve of his back is still there,_ ” the chips taunt.

_“And how it would feel under your lips.”_

I see my reflection in the mirror above the desk, and wonder if this is the face of a person who gets left alone for three days and in that time, unravels a marriage of fifteen years and a life.

I think of the Oliver who puts on his snow boots and shovels the snow before the kids leave for school, the one who will come back with a briefcase at the end of the day and asks over pot roast how the writing of his wife’s next article is going. That Oliver doesn’t spend days in museums or kissing old lovers in restrooms of bars. That Oliver wouldn’t play with fire with the said old lover because he is sensible and knows what’s best for him.

 _“We don’t do things like that, Oliver_ ,” says the Pale Oak, “ _didn’t we raise you better than this?”_

There’s never been any doubt about what is expected of me and I have gotten good at carrying it out. That Oliver wouldn’t dream of short hair that tufts out from the slots between his fingers or the scent that lives in the dip on Elio’s neck.

That Oliver.

I’m not him, but I’ve gotten very good at inhabiting him. There’s no pain involved for anyone else in his life, because he’s learned to bear it himself. The house will get painted, the kids will get to have their family and his mother his shiny son; Micol will stay married and get his husband home by six every night.

That Oliver takes her and their children to his mother’s Sunday night dinners and they’ll live a quiet, content life where there’s no fire nor a single complication beyond agreeing on the exact tone of a paint chip. Because that’s how it’s supposed to be lived, life.

That Oliver picks up the phone.

I stare out the window without registering the view.

Elio answers on the second ring, cheerful. “Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Oh.”

Even from a single sound I can tell he’s smiling. I feel terrible.

“I’m about to head out soon,” he continues. “The car should be here in thirty minutes. But I’ll see you back here at eight?”

I rub my face and take a deep breath. “About that. I don’t think we should do it.”

“Do what?”

“The dinner. Or anything.”

“Why?” The syllable gets narrower, the wide of his smile is withering away. “Did something happen?”

“And you need to forget what I said in the garden. Not that any of it was—it’s not like you didn’t already know all that.”

“I didn’t, not for certain.”

“Well, now you do. But I shouldn’t have said it. It wasn’t fair to you, or anyone.” I feel sick and can’t even bring her name up.

A silence, then an audible swallow. “No dinner?”

“No. I think it’s for the best.”

“You wanted a chance to turn down my dinner invitation in return.” His voice is now cold and I can imagine his features freezing, his mouth pulling to a non-expression.

“That’s not it and you know it.”

“Why then?”

“You know why.” I’m not afraid that he’d get drunk again; I’m not afraid that he’d flirt and tempt and beg me. I’m afraid that I would.

“So that’s it? You know that I’m leaving for home tomorrow morning, right?”

“Maybe we can have coffee before you leave. In the morning. In public.”

“What would be the point? So you could wish me safe travels and tell me what a great time we had, as old friends?”

“Elio—”

“I don’t understand. You said that you’d thought about— And I thought that you might, finally— But obviously you don’t care, after all.”

“I do care.” I want to add that I care more than I do about anyone else, but I’m not sure if that would only hurt him more.

He pauses and swallows again, now it sounds like he’s drinking something. “Care? During these past years, you haven’t called once. And I know I haven’t either, but what was I supposed to do? Force you to take me? I couldn’t just up and leave, I was seventeen. I had no money. You had told me you didn’t want me.” His speech speeds up. “But you—you, all you needed to do was to come back. All you needed to do was to—”

His words are suddenly drowned out by a clink and a hiss, then glass shattering in the background.

“Elio, what was that?”

He sounds distracted. “Fuck. Shit. Oh, that was just—“ He chuffs and groans and his voice is talking off to the side of the receiver now. “Ouch!”

“Elio, what’s going on?”

“Nothing, I dropped my— and tried to— Never mind. It’s nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. And you know what, you’re right. What’s the point of a dinner? What’s the point of delaying this any longer. Have a good night and enjoy the rest of your stay in Nice.”

The call cuts off.

The call was meant to quiet the restlessness in me, to stop those unsettling feelings from coming to fruition. It didn’t accomplish that.

 _Are you happy,_ Elio had asked me in the morning.

What was happiness anyway? Was anyone really happy? Does anyone get that? No, what you get are fleeting moments of it if you’re lucky, but most of life is mundane and there will be consequences if you try to shake the equilibrium by aiming for something more. That’s not what you do. You don’t upset the gods by wanting too much. Aphrodite had given us that summer and that was it.

I think about how easily we could’ve never met. All it would’ve taken was my being assigned to someone else that summer, maybe to a house somewhere in Lazio, with a family called the Vagnonis, and the trajectory of my life would’ve been different.

Would I then have been happy with Micol? Knowing there was nothing better out there? No one to make me like the ugly corners of myself, to forgive my flaws and missteps or insist that there was nothing to be forgiven in the first place.

We are a team, Micol and I. That hadn’t been a lie. But I imagine Elio taking his questioning further, his ‘ _are you happy’_ being followed by ‘ _why not’_ and ‘ _what’s wrong with her’_.

I don’t have an answer for him.

My intention was to go for an evening walk to clear my head, but I don’t get far and sit on the first blue bench on the promenade, instead. The sea is still sparkling and the sun pretends that it’s never going down. In another life, I could be getting ready for a dinner with Elio.

In yet another life, I could be coming home to him. Him, instead of Micol. There would be no dinner ready or linen napkins in the particular shade of robin's egg blue she’s hunted down from Providence, but there would be music when I'd enter through the door, and someone on my skin as soon as Elio would've heard my arrival over the piece he was playing. There'd be limbs around my neck, lips on my lips, probably on my throat as well. There would be dinner when and how we’d like it, and it would be consumed with Elio's foot climbing from my ankle to my lap.

I get up from the bench and decide to go to bed early.

I dream about him.

No vague metaphors, but a very direct dream where we are at my office, back at the university, and he comes onto me and I let him. The door is open and I keep frantically checking if the people passing by in the hallway see us, but not one of them looks in, while Elio is spread stark naked on my dented leather couch, begging for me to take him. He talks like he sometimes talked that summer, in the heat of the moment and I was never sure if he knew afterwards what he had said. But he talks like that now, in the dream, and asks what’s wrong with Micol and all I can tell him is: _she’s not you_.

When the alarm goes off, I wake up covered in sweat and with a hard-on.

A hard-on which quickly goes away when I realize that it’s not my wake-up alarm, but instead, a much more insisting, shrill sound and it rings through the hallways, too.

A fire alarm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of the angst in this fic was contained in this chapter, and the rest of it will trickle out during the next chapter as the fire scare (no worries, no one will get hurt; this is not that kind of a fic) propels Oliver to realize what to do with his heart.
> 
> Also, a fun fact: This fic began its life as a _Lost in Translation_ AU some time last year, but it turned out it didn’t work at all, so I minced up my early draft and kept only what I liked and eventually turned it into this canon-related story. However, some scenes or plot points can be traced back to being inspired by the 2003 Sofia Coppola film: this interruption by a fire alarm, for example, and Micol's insistence on the paint chips, and the late-night meet-ups at the hotel bar at the beginning of the story.
> 
> See you next week and I promise things will turn for the better...


	8. Fire!

The driveway and the sidewalk in front of the hotel are a sea of identical hotel robes in the dark, and I search for Elio among them. His room has been on a lower floor and closer to the stairs, so he should be here already. Instead of panic, there’s only a cloud of irritation emanating from the other travelers over what they’ve concluded is a false alarm, but my pulse still spikes when I can’t find him.

It occurs to me that maybe he stayed for dinner after his concert this time, maybe he let the man take him to a fancy restaurant, maybe a place overlooking the harbor. A different wave of nausea washes over me as I think that at least that would mean that Elio was safe now, but—

Then, a shape a little to the side by the curb, sharp shoulders, hands deep in the big terrycloth pockets of the robe.

I dash through the groggy crowd.

“Elio.”

He looks straight at me, bold and blank: _so now you want to see me._

“I’m glad you’re here. This,” I wave at the group of firemen going into the building, “—is probably nothing, but still.”

“I was up anyway.”

His hair is damp and closer to the skull and in the ample folds of the one-size-fits-all robe he looks more boyish than he has all week.

I feel guilty for sleeping while he’s been up, maybe just having taken a shower when the alarm came. I was dreaming of him but it doesn’t count. Or am I flattering myself, thinking he would lose sleep over one missed dinner with me?

We watch the commotion of the murmuring travelers, people looking up every time a hotel employee steps out and getting slightly more restless every time they say it’ll still take a while. The night is warm but there’s a wall between us now as we stand side by side, eyes fixed on the hotel.

“We flew too close to the fire,” I tell him eventually, and I’m not talking about the alarm.

He grants me a slow glance. “I know.”

I keep my gaze straight ahead so as not to scare him away. ”It’s not easy to make it go away. Not when you remember everything.”

"Everything? Like how I put my finger inside you that first night in Rome and we almost missed the book party?" He's brash on purpose, wants to see how I react.

Maybe I want to see his bet and raise him a twenty; maybe it's what I've been wanting to ask and this just gives me the window of a pathetic opportunity.

"Did you do that to Michel?"

The surprise doesn’t land. I've failed at calling his bluff and he’s not folding. His irises reflect with the light from the lamp posts and the knowledge that he has me. I wouldn't have asked if I didn't care.

"No, just you," he says and I don't even care if he's lying.

He turns to me, hands still deep in the pockets of the robe. The first strand of his hair that’s dry enough escapes and falls to cover his face.

He’s not cold anymore. The idea that he would be next to me cold, has been worse than the idea of him across the ocean thinking well of me. The smallest hint of coldness from him freezes my heart and there have been years when I haven’t let that thought anywhere near me, that he might be upset with me about what happened on the Christmas break.

I probably make the decision there, on the street teeming with hotel guests in robes and stressed-out concierges and night guards. When we later fight about this with Micol I can claim it just happened, it was the scare of the alarm, the surreal atmosphere of the in-between time of the night when it isn’t midnight anymore but not quite dawn yet either. Or I’ll blame it on the age-old excuse, the lure of an old lover and an unfinished story. But none of those are true. It doesn’t just happen, it isn’t accidental, and I know what I’m doing.

“We weren’t very good at this.”

Elio chuckles. It’s not entirely hollow and the sound further chips away at the wall between us. “No.”

When he looks at me and I look at him, we both know we’re not going to our rooms alone.

We listen to the chatter around us and jumpstart along with everyone else whenever a fireman comes out, then sigh and grumble when they tell us they’re still not done yet. We look at the plump wedge of the moon, shrouded by clouds for most of the time but occasionally taking a peek at us mere mortals, and know that it had to come to this. We had to try, had to see if we could go back to the days before he had told me the things that mattered, to the days when we were just friends.

But those days never existed. We were gone for each other since the beginning and already on the days when we couldn’t tell anyone, least of all each other.

So forging them now? Impossible.

Elio steps closer to me in the crowd and I don’t move, neither of us moves until they finally, finally, tell us that we’re allowed to go back inside again, and they don’t let people use the elevators so we take the stairs. He climbs and doesn’t look back because he knows I’m following and when we get to the third floor, he simply opens the door to his room and lets me walk in first.

The room is still dark when I take him into my arms. He’s mostly robe and inside a boy, and I apologize.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

For the call, for the night before, for the years. For falling for him and taking him with me. If only I could have born this alone without having to scar him too.

“Don’t be,” he starts to say but then I kiss him, without a dare or a set-up. I kiss him like I did in my dream, rough, unabashed, with abandon, and he yields within my arms. He lets me apologize to his upper lip, the pillow of the bottom one, his tongue, the sharp of his teeth. I apologize to his throat and neck until he’s breathless and smiles.

I still remember the very first dream I ever had of him.

It had been after the third or fourth day after my arrival. My conscious mind hadn’t dared to settle on a conclusion yet, and my thoughts had been a swirl. A swirl of urges to flee after his words had touched too close, and immediate regrets, because leaving had meant that I’d missed out on hearing more of them from him.

In the dream, we’d sat around a fire, I’d been vaguely aware of there having been others earlier, but we’d been left alone. He’d started the fire but it wasn’t taking and he’d asked me to help, to kindle the flickering flames but I hadn’t known how.

Nothing had happened, the entire dream had been just that: him looking at me, waiting, smiling in the glow of the fire.

When he reaches to turn on the lights in the room, the sleeve of his robe rides up and I see his fingers: thin red stripes from gashes, hints of dried blood.

“Elio, your hand. What happened?”

“Nothing. I tried to pick up the pieces of the glass I dropped.”

I think back to our phone call and the shattering noises in the background. “Is this what that noise was? On the phone?”

“Yes, I was having a glass of wine, I was nervous about the concert. And us, after.” He glances at me. “But it’s fine now, I called the reception and they sent someone and they cleaned it up. I’m fine,” he insists but I walk over to him and make him sit down.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I take his hand in mine, careful not to touch the wounds.

He shrugs. “It really was nothing. And you would’ve just wanted to come over. I didn’t want you to come out of pity.”

“Elio, you were hurt.”

He says nothing—the shards of glass hadn’t been the ones that had hurt him.

I lift his hand to my lips. “I’m sorry.” He lets me press a kiss onto his knuckles, press a kiss onto each nub of a bone, stroke my lips against them. “This whole week has been—"

“But I would still seek you out at the bar. Remember?” he says and he watches me, keen, as I uncurl his fingers and lay them stretched onto my palm.

He lets me kiss his fingers; winces when I go too close to the scrapes and I hurry to apologize. I kiss the inside of his wrist, smooth and pale like the creamy top of the panna cotta at dinner, then a spot an inch above his wrist, then an inch above that.

The thin hairs on his forearm, lightened by the sun, stand up under my lips.

I push the sleeve of his robe up as I go but eventually it doesn’t give anymore, and he rushes to pull his arm from the sleeve and pushes the robe down to his waist. I press my mouth on the bone of his shoulder, exposed from under the thick robe, and I am already gone. He knows it, too, as his eyes follow my face and he holds still as I skip over the obvious path along his neck and go straight to pressing my mouth on his. It opens before I even touch it and lets me sink into the well of temptation that has been dangled in front of me for four days or sixteen years.

We can’t stop there.

Maybe he had thought that we could, when he dared me to kiss him the night before. That we could have a taste of the past and drink it to our souls’ content, but he would then return me to my life.

I’m the one who doesn’t let go. I kiss him behind his ear and he closes his eyes and breathes, the exhale vibrating against my skin. His hair, still damp near the skull, entwines around my fingers until I realize that I have known this all along and he should have, too: we could never stop at a meager kiss, we would always want all of each other’s souls, words, and bodies and we would stop at nothing.

The sheets are white and soft and he slender but firm. The pajamas nestled under our robes prove easy, no belts or buttons to solve, simply a push or a tug or a pull does it all.

The bridge of his nose slides smooth under the pad of my forefinger, the bottom lip gives under my pressure. The dip on the inside of his elbow is warm, and like all the bends in him, smells more of him than the rest.

It’s a melting of two bodies and we’ve spoken enough so it’s wordless, sometimes a “please”, a “yes”, and “please” again, until he arches his body to push back at my cock, desperate to have all of me inside him. His face sinking into the pillows, I kiss his damp nape and grunt that I’m going to pull out so that he can turn around.

“I haven’t thought of this for years only to not see your face now.”

He rolls over under me to lie on his back and the dark of his eyes and the red swollen flush of his lips almost make me come on the spot. He’s hungry and needy and as much as I’m his, he’s mine. Mine, mine, mine. Under me, unraveled, and none of this will ever be over for either of us.

“I adore you,” I say.

His chest, pink and pressed with marks from the sheets, rises and falls. “I know.”

“Only you.”

That is always the thing for him and he pulls me down to kiss him.

I come hard, every nerve-ending on fire and my face pressed into the veins on his neck. He winced before that and I said that I didn’t want to hurt him, I didn’t need to come inside him, I could pull out, but he stopped me almost violently and hissed that he would never forgive me if I did that.

Light-headedness, like after spinning on a carousel with the boys when they were little.

Vague impressions of the terrycloth of the robe sliding against my skin.

Elio is the one to take care of me, and I am too out of breath to tell him to leave some of him on me, so he wipes it all off.

He pushes the robe back onto the floor and comes back to me.

He strokes my hair. These days I like to have it close-cut for the summer.

“I like the shape of your head,” he says.

He rolls over to his side of the bed for a while. His hair pillows around his head like a halo.

“I thought your hair would do that nowadays.”

“What?” he asks.

I shake my head and smile. “Nothing.”

I kiss him and he climbs on top of me.

He lies face pressed into my neck, heart against heart and limbs encasing me. The beautiful weighted feeling of his body on me that instead of restraining me, makes me soar.

“Oh, how I have missed this,” I sigh.

“Fucking?” he asks.

I chuckle. “That too.”

He lifts his face and I explain: “You, like this.”

He doesn’t say _you could have had this all these years_ , because it is both true and impossible. I couldn’t have done it then, even with all this hindsight. It hadn’t been the time.

“What if we had met later?” he asks. He’s read my mind. “The next summer? Or five years later when I was in the States? Or now?”

“I don’t know.”

I would like to think that we would’ve seen each other, truly seen each other no matter the circumstances, but life isn’t always lenient.

“Did I need to see you every day in those bathing suits and hear you breathe in the other room at night?” he continues. “Or would I have found this,” he turns his face so that his lips happen upon mine, “—even if I’d seen you in a cafeteria, in a tweed blazer, sitting with boring professors?”

He lays his head on my chest after the kiss.

“I don’t own a tweed blazer,” I say.

“I think that summer was what it was meant to be. You were the one who was meant to be my first.”

He seems to be having this conversation by himself, for himself, and I’m only a stand-in. I say nothing but hold him tighter.

“Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“I was fumbling so much but I didn’t want you to stop. Did I say it?”

“You did.”

“But eventually we had to stop.”

And now we’ve started up again and I don’t know how this will end.


	9. Stolen Day

_“What will happen now?”_

That’s the question I expect to hear the next morning, but that’s not what happens.

“I don’t really need to be in Paris until Sunday,” Elio says as the first thing when I open my eyes. “I could stay an extra day. Take the ten o’clock train tomorrow.”

The sunlight is filtered by the gauzy curtains, the silhouettes of palm trees playing behind them, and I’m not going to argue with him. What we both would’ve given for an extra day in Rome! Maybe the universe stole it from us then, only to repay us now.

“What do you want to do today? Do you need to work on your book? How’s the editing going?”

“It isn’t.” I sigh, then smile. “My mind has been elsewhere this week.”

“I’m not complaining,” he says, head on my chest and fingers playing with the old faded scar on my side. You can hardly see it, you’d have to know it was there. “But is there anything I could do? I could read something if it helps? Give another perspective?”

“Thank you.” I kiss the crown of his head. “But I’m mainly stuck in a couple of places and I’ll need the sources before I can continue.”

“Which places? Tell me.” He leans his chin close on my chest and I can make out every single one of his eyelashes. Even the ones in the corner of his right eye that stubbornly curl in the opposite direction than all the others.

“One is the origin of the four elements. See, Heraclitus thinks that the world is ultimately grounded on fire and fire alone, but Empedocles was the first to mention all four that we currently think as the basis structures of the world: air, water, earth, and fire.”

“Your Heraclitus didn’t think so?”

“He thought that everything came from fire and eventually was consumed by it. And he’s not my Heraclitus.”

“He’s not?” Elio plays with the nub of my earlobe.

”Jealous?” I tease him.

He kisses my ear. “Silly. And what’s the other thing you’re stuck on?”

“The authenticity of the river fragments.”

“There are several of them?”

“Three. But most people claim that only one of them is real. And the others mere imitations.”

“How so?”

“They can’t all be real, because Heraclitus wasn’t known to repeat himself. If he had expressed something, he wouldn’t repeat it in a variation of it.”

“He’d find the one and stick with it?”

“Something like that. And we don’t have pigments to prove which one came first.” I push his hair away from his face. “So I’m looking into the different translations and discussing the arguments for each. But I didn’t bring the sources with me, so now I’m at a dead end until I get back home.”

“Which source are you missing?”

“The French one by Battistini. And the German one wouldn’t hurt either, but the Battistini would already get me much further.”

“Why don’t we go the Dubouchage and see if they have it?”

“What’s the Dubouchage?”

“A library. They have a heritage section and I’ll bet they have your book.”

I tip my head back. “The library? Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because your mind has been elsewhere,” he says tenderly.

We order in breakfast. There’s apricot jam everywhere and a bed full of crumbs, and Elio almost tips over his coffee but I save the cup at the last second and the bed remains safe.

Our plan of going to the library gets further delayed by him kissing my neck after he’s done with his food, little pecks that morph into open-mouthed presses on my skin, all breath and wet tongue. His fingers stick to my skin and I ask to see them, kiss the tips and lick them clean of the apricot jam and he keeps insisting I missed a spot. Clean and wet, his fingers now slide under the cover, stop at my hip but then continue determinedly, then stop on my thigh again. His eyes are liquid at this close distance and I nod and open my legs.

It’s tentative at first, and he asks: “Do you like it?”

He watches my mouth, my words, when I tell him that I do, I do like it, more than like it, and it escalates to me letting him be my top.

It’s been sixteen years for me, so he takes his time, so long that we get interrupted by someone wanting to make up the room and Elio leaves me on the bed, lying on my stomach like a hunting prize and wraps a sheet around his waist to go to the door and tell the maid to come back later.

Even if I hadn’t enjoyed myself, it would’ve been worth it just to see him strut around after. I tease him and his eyes are drunk with pride as he gets dressed in front of me.

When we’re finally on our way out, late into the afternoon, he stops by at the reception and lets them know they can make up the room now.

“Do you think they know about us?” I ask.

“I hope so,” Elio smiles as he strides past the doorman, and when he turns his head to glance back at me, it’s the kind of smile that makes me want to run back upstairs with him immediately.

The front of the library facing the Durandy Square is adorned with a sundial and the letters for the year MDCCCLXXVI underneath it. The gnomon is missing, so the dial can’t show time but that suits us well. For now, time doesn’t exist.

The cool and quiet of the heritage section of the library soothes us after the searing sun outside and we find Battistini’s translation of the works of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles easily. I find a desk and pull out my notepad and pen.

Elio keeps wandering between the shelves, pulling out books and putting them back until he comes back to me with one, sits across from me. We’re not alone, there’s a woman sitting at a desk at the other end of the room. She glanced at us when we entered but has gotten back to her work now.

I browse through my book until I find the section where Heraclitus talks about stepping into a river. I copy the French translation of the fragment B12 and then continue on to the variations of it, B49a and B91. They are the ones that are most likely just interpretations by other philosophers that came after Heraclitus and which have, mistakenly, later been attributed to him. There have been several arguments against them being genuine, as in Greek, they have no alliteration, chiasmus or other features typical to Heraclitus’ phrasing, and—

There’s a cool, soft press of a bare foot on my knee.

I look up and Elio is slowly leafing through his book, feigning interest. I hold onto my breath and glance at the woman, but she’s immersed in her work.

Elio keeps his eyes on the book in front of him and his face gives nothing away. I turn back to my notes, but his foot slides further up my thigh until one toe slips underneath the leg of my shorts. We both look up.

“I’ve barely gotten started. At this rate, we’ll be here all day,” I mouth to him but bite back a smile. I look at his bottom lip. It’s separated from the top one, a breath’s distance away, but enough for me to see the tip of his tongue.

“I’ll behave,” he whispers softly and fixes his eyes on his book.

The foot doesn’t leave but it doesn’t move further either, and I pick up my pen again and try to concentrate enough to continue to Empedocles and his elements.

The woman leaves after half an hour and Elio closes the book he’s used as his decoy and returns it to the shelf. We’re alone.

He comes and sits next to me. Slides his hand under the hem of my shirt, slips it up my back, rubs circles. “Am I bothering you?”

I lean into his touch. “No. I’m almost done.”

He rests his chin on my shoulder, looks at my notes. “Can I read it? Your book. One day, before you give it to the publisher.”

I’ll have to send it to him. I wish I could just ask him to come to my study, instead, after dinner, before we go to bed, he on the right side and I on the left.

“You can hear my next piece before I play it anywhere,“ he bargains. That couldn’t be done over the mail. But over the phone, perhaps.

I close my notes and we return the Battistini to its place, and Elio embraces me, safely between the high shelves. He leans back, the back of his head pushing back the volumes of old books and his bottom lip is redder than the top one. He kept biting it, when he pretended to be reading. He looks up at me, eyes silhouetted by a thicket of dark lashes.

“What if we skipped dinner?” he begs, hands light on my hips.

I almost give in to him.

When he’s cutting into his roasted farm chicken in an alley where there hasn’t been a hint of wind in weeks, and our table wobbles on the uneven cobblestones, I slide my toes behind his ankle. The dusk is settling in and no one would care anyway, the neighboring tables are too occupied with fanning themselves with their menus in the sauna-like cul-de-sac.

He smiles, so I know he feels it, but continues working on the food on his plate.

After two mouthfuls, he asks: “What are you doing?”

“Nothing you weren’t doing at the library.”

His cheeks glow and his lashes flutter close and open again.

I’ve been thinking about this all evening. “I can’t wait to have you in my bed.”

“You mean my bed,” he corrects and we pass by it swiftly: the reminder that my bed, in fact, belongs to someone else and I can’t bring him there.

Elio insists on paying for our roasted chickens.

“We could do rock-paper-scissors again,” I offer.

“I’m not letting you pay for my dinner two nights in a row. My turn.”

“I like treating you,” I tell him and wonder if I’m trying to use it to make up for other things.

“I know,” he says lightly and gestures the waiter over to our table.

When we get back to his room, it’s pristine again and a part of me is at loss already. The signs of the night before, of this afternoon, are gone. I want to chronicle each step I’ve taken with him, then and now, how he’s slipping off his shoes and opening the doors to the balcony. How he’s now asking: “Come here,” and I go to stand beside him looking out to the tops of the palm trees and beyond.

The people below us on the patio are going out or coming into the hotel to finish off their nights. We stand shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh and he tips his head, rests his temple on my shoulder. The smoke from my cigarette softens into a shapeless cloud as it begins its drift towards the sea. I dream of a life where this wouldn’t feel clandestine, illegal.

We stay until the patio below us gets quiet and the waiters pile up the chairs for the night. Inside, there’s another world waiting for us but this quietude and closeness is a luxury, too.

He turns his head, nuzzles his face on my shoulder. A car drives by.

I put out my cigarette.

My arm loosely around his waist I ask: “Shall we?” and he follows.

He lies across the foot of the bed, shorts lost and shirt about to join them. He had first sat there and I had kissed him and toppled him over. Peeled the shorts off of him while he watched, lazily trying to help. There’s a vulnerability to him; from the waist up looking like he’s just resting for a bit in the afternoon, and naked from the waist down. Shins lightly tanned where his shorts hadn’t covered them, thighs pale, the dark nest of hair curling. Hard and waiting, me and mine.

He smiles. “Well?”

“I could look at you forever. I’ll never get enough.”

He lifts his arms and tucks them under his head. _Feel free._

I wonder when his patience will run out but it isn’t until I’ve kneeled between his knees, pulled him down so that his bare soles rest against the floor and I have him right where I want him. I let him keep his shirt but brush my lips on the inside of his knee, hands covering the backs of his calves, then kiss the soft spot where his knee ends and thigh starts. He spreads his legs without me asking, making room for my nose and mouth and chin to run up his inner thigh.

He’s thick in my mouth and I want to see how his eyes fall shut, how his body trembles when I touch him here, how it tightens up just before I make him come. The desire. The desire to treat his limbs as if they were my own, mine to kiss, mine to—

He comes with a twitch and a tremble and fingers clutching the back of my neck.

Later, his blunt nails press half-moons into my skin. _Don’t go, Oliver_.

“I’ll come back,” I promise. “I’m just going to the bathroom to clean up.”

Someone else might have avoided the mirror, to not face the things they’ve done or the person they’ve become, but I need to look.

_Still me_.

Everything is still in its correct place, not even distorted, like the images of those funhouse-mirrors that return your reflection as something unrecognizable. My sons loved them when they were small. They still might.

I wonder if Elio sees any of the lines around my mouth or eyes or if my face is imprinted into him as it was then, any changes filtered out by the brain. If his mind is saturated, like mine, with the images from that summer and all the thoughts accompanying them.

_I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you._

Tomorrow he will leave, be the one to get on a plane except his will be a train, a train back to Paris. How can I let him go? How have I been able to let him go last time, or the time before that? He will take my heart with him: it isn’t in my chest or in St-Paul-de-Vence or even in the old bedroom in B., it’s on the other side of this bathroom door. It’s in that bed, as naked as the body it lives in.

It begins to build in me—I want him again.

I don’t think the desire will ever run out, but it isn’t only that. I would take a lifetime of merely talking with him over anyone else.

Ever since I saw him lean on the counter of the bar on Monday night and let his eyes fall upon me, have I truly thought for a second that I’d be able to go back to my life, like nothing had happened? Go back to the house in New Hampshire, when he’s my life, my colors old and new, my forever?

It feels like the time has come for me to gather up the pieces I’ve scattered along my journey. To be reunited with my heart and start living with all my parts in one place.

Elio has fallen asleep while I’ve been gone. I slide back into the bed with him.

“You came back,” he mumbles and burrows into me.

“I always will.”

He comes to a little bit more. “Do you mean that?”

I wish I could pack up and leave with him, leave this second and sit with him on a train through France, but I have to give my sons one last summer before they leave home. Give Micol an explanation and time to accept that there’s nothing she could’ve done differently.

“I have to go back first, to arrange everything, but after that, I’ll come back and I’ll never leave again.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Good.”

He’s already back to sleep and I wonder if he’ll remember this. If he doesn’t, I’ll have to remind him in the morning. And the next morning, and the next.

There’ll be a lifetime of mornings ahead of us.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The [sundial](https://www.irresistible-riviera.fr/images/comprendre/cadran-solaire-nice/cadrans-solaires-nice-2-durandy.jpg) at the Romain Gary library, previously known as the Dubouchage library, in Nice.
> 
> _“I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you”_ is a quote from Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_.
> 
> I hope to see you here next week for the final chapter <3


	10. Morning Passages

Over the next week, when Micol and I argue all over Nice and she tries to make sense of it all to herself, I will think back to this moment. This moment on my last and yet first morning with Elio and how the iridescent skin on his temples almost shows the blood in his veins and how many mornings with him I’ve missed out on.

His mouth is latched onto my shoulder, open and oblivious to the sunrise, and I hate to wake him up but he has a train to catch and Micol will return from the village soon.

Elio has wriggled himself on top of the sheets in the course of the night, lies there naked and debauched. The light hits the white fabric and its scrunched patterns of seduction and deception.

It doesn’t escape me that there would’ve been better ways to do this, but here we are.

I unwrap his hand from around my waist and kiss the pulse trembling beneath its wrist. “I'm not a good person.”

His lids flutter and underneath, his eyes are sleepy but gentle. He looks at me, cheek resting on the pillow. “You're the best person I know. There's nothing you could do that would stop me from wanting to be with you.”

 _You’re my partner in crime, you’re supposed to say that_ , I think, but want to believe at least some of it. Maybe one day I will.

He senses my hesitation and moves closer, wraps his arms around my neck and cradles the back of my head.

His body fits into my embrace twice over. I kiss his shoulder, still warm from sleep. “I don’t deserve you.”

He pulls back to look me in the eye. My throat constricts.

“I wonder how many years it’ll take for me to convince you otherwise.”

“We’ll find out,” I say and the kiss is long, deep.

“You also deserve breakfast,” he says after, arms still around me and face buried in my neck. “How much time do we have?”

“When does your car leave?”

He brushes his thumb on my chin. “That’s not what I meant. How much longer before she comes back?”

The bubble of the past days is getting thinner now, translucent, and soon it’ll collapse and vanish altogether. The reality awaits.

“There’s enough time for a breakfast, I think. She didn’t give specifics.”

He studies my face but his eyes are tender, and I don’t think anyone’s ever looked at me quite like this, not even him. It’s not going to be easy what will happen next, and he knows it. ”I don’t envy you.”

Micol and I will sit on a bench in front of the hotel, staring at the sea so that we don’t have to look at each other, and she’ll ask how long I’ve known and I’ll gauge whether it would be cruel or, in fact, merciful to tell her that I’ve known since I first came back from Italy. To tell her that she didn’t do anything wrong, that there weren’t enough rose gardens in the world to make me happy the way one lop-sided smile from Elio does. That no matter how many years have gone by, it hasn’t changed: it hasn’t changed even though I’ve become a man with sunspots and Elio a measured young man who writes his own music instead of translating the notes of others.

It hasn’t changed, so I need to change.

On our way to breakfast, Elio and I pass the front desk and the receptionist calls after him.

“ _Monsieur Perlman_?”

“Yes?”

“You were planning to take a car to the railway station later this morning, yes?”

“Yes. Is that still possible?”

“There are road closures on both Boulevard Victor Hugo and Avenue Jean Medecin, and the traffic is at standstill. You might want to leave earlier to make sure you make it to your train.”

“How much earlier?”

The man looks apologetic. “As soon as you can. I’m sorry, sir.”

Elio looks at me.

“It’s fine,” I nod. “Go get your bags, I’ll wait here.”

He heads back for the elevators. This isn’t what we had planned, and I sit down in the lobby thinking whether I should offer to get in the car with him; maybe we’d have time for a coffee at the train station or at least we’d get to talk on the ride over.

Elio comes back down soon, steps out of the elevator carrying his bags and heads for the front desk. I get up, but at the same time, a woman pulling a carry-on bag walks in the entrance, heels clacking on the marble floor and a strand of hair bouncing on her smiling face.

Micol.

“Oliver? What are you doing here?” She seems stunned for a moment before it turns into disbelief. She checks behind her: “Were you waiting for me?”

“I— Yes, I—” I glance over and see Elio handing his key to the receptionist and signing his check. “I thought I’d try my luck. I didn’t know when you were coming back.”

“Oh, yes.” She sweeps the tendril off of her face and I think to make the motion of kissing her cheek. “We finished the final interview early, so here I am. Apparently there are some road closures but we came in from the south.”

I hear nothing she says and instead, feverishly try to think of how to get her to go upstairs before Elio will be done at the desk. I can’t let him leave without talking to him.

Micol’s smile reaches her eyes and she’s in a much better mood than she’s been since we got here—if I wasn’t distracted, I might wonder about it, but for now, I’m only trying to find a spot to interrupt her. Before I do, someone taps me on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir, I think you dropped this.”

Elio’s green eyes are looking at me neutral as a stranger’s as he presses a folded note, hastily torn from a lined paper, into my hand.

“Oh. Thank you. I—“

Micol touches my other arm, not paying much attention or aware of anything unusual. “Should we go up now? I’m exhausted and I haven’t had a decent shower in days.”

“You’re welcome,” Elio says to me.

“ _Monsieur Perlman,_ your car has arrived,” calls the concierge.

“That’s me,” Elio says and nods to Micol and me with a smile.

Upstairs, Micol rushes to change her clothes. I sit on the bed that hasn’t been slept in, the sheets clean and lifeless, and watch her whirling about in her robe, unpacking the carry-on she’s had with her. She keeps talking about the painter’s studio, a little restaurant in the village, the early dinners and late breakfasts they’d had there with the photographer. She takes out her tape recorder and a bag of tapes, scratches a stain off of one of them before stacking them into her suitcase.

When she’s placed her notebooks on a neat pile on the desk and rolled the carry-on to the closet holding the rest of our luggage, she disappears into the bathroom complaining about the water pressure in her auberge.

When she’ll come out after her shower, I’ll close my eyes as if that could ever shield either of us from what was to come, and I’ll ask if she remembers finding the receipt for six martinis.

But for now, I barely hear her grumbling and when she closes the door and turns on the shower head, I unfold Elio’s note, scribbled in his hand-writing that is no more sophisticated than the one I remember from over a dozen years ago.

I think back to the moment he placed the note in my hand, his thumb stopping on mine for a second, and we had known it wasn't going to be the last we would see of each other. The thread of knowing between us would stretch and return, but it wouldn't sever. One day, one of us would start recoiling the thread again and find the other at the other end of it.

That day will come after one last July with my family, when the pines of Jardin Atlantique above the Gare Montparnasse railway station have started showing signs of fatigue after a rousing August, and September brings me home to a city where I’ve never lived in.

“ _Allô_? _”_

I smile to myself in the phone booth when I hear his voice at the other end of the line.

It’s been three months, but won’t be much longer. We are so close now. So close, after all this time.

“Suppose you could show me the Daphnis and Chloé on the ceiling at the Opéra,” I say instead of a greeting.

“What?”

“Suppose I came to Paris.” There’s a long silence at the other end. “Elio?”

I hear furniture moving in the background, maybe he sat down. “Oliver. Are you here?”

“Suppose I was in a phone booth on the corner of Rue des Thermopyles, keeping an eye on my luggage that is now also being watched by a suspiciously keen young man.”

“The booth next to the pâtisserie?”

I look around me and spot the orange-brown striped awning and the madeleines in the window. “Yes.”

He exhales a long sigh at the other end, so close to his receiver that the wind from his breath makes the line rustle. “Well, that’s François, then. It wouldn’t be the first time. I hope you don’t have anything valuable in your bags.”

“Suppose I’m only five minutes away from your place, depending on how long it will take me to walk up that sidewalk with my bag and whether that poodle or its leash will trip me.”

“Little Antoine?”

“Maybe?”

“Pristine white but with a brown spot near the tail?”

“That’s the one.” Enough with the local scenery. “Suppose I came back.”

“To visit?” We’ve talked about this, several times over the past three months. The latest of which was last night, when I called him from a phone booth at the Kennedy airport before boarding, but he wants to make sure that I haven’t changed my mind over the Atlantic.

“To stay.”

There are sounds, syllables, maybe beginnings of words but they are silenced to give way to: “They haven’t replaced the number sign.”

“The sign?”

“On my door.“

I understand. After sixteen years, all of this is too real and too overwhelming; he needs to counter with mundane. That’s okay, we’ll have time. Later.

“The number fell off and they haven’t replaced it. But I’m between the 27 and 31. The blue door. I’m here,” he says. He takes a deep breath and repeats: “I’m here.”

I hang up the receiver and get hold of my luggage to the great disappointment of the young man named François, who was looking to make a few euros at my expense.

I start walking up the tapering cobblestone sidewalk to the unnumbered blue door, behind which I will find Elio, radiant and cheeks flushing, the music sheets for his new piece strewn across his dining table and spotted with juice from a half-eaten slice of an orange. His piano will take up most of the room, and his books will be stacked in the tall bookshelf, except for the Mansfield on the floor near the armchair and the tattered Gogol on top of the piano and the copy of Celan’s last that I’ll find on the windowsill in the bathroom later that night.

Elio will be expecting a student in thirty-five minutes, but we’ll get to kiss each other for thirty-four before that, and he’ll let me stay in the other room and listen to the student play _Morning Passages_ and there will be a hard part that she’ll struggle with, and Elio will tell her, with his voice breaking in the middle, that the notes will fall into place for her eventually, that sometimes things just take time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [_Morning Passages_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYHNRAGyDc), composed by Philip Glass (2002).
> 
> *
> 
> Thank you for reading and for having been here; we’ll leave them in Paris <3 
> 
> I’ll always be happy to hear what you thought, whether you read this soon after posting or find this much later on.
> 
> I'm [angel-in-new-york-city](https://angel-in-new-york-city.tumblr.com) on tumblr
> 
> *
> 
> PS. For those who are interested: there were roses coming up here and there in the story, and this was something I listened to a lot when I was writing this story:
> 
>  _When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long_  
>  _And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong_  
>  _Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows_  
>  _Lies the seed, that with the sun's love in the spring becomes the rose_  
>   
>  \- from [_The Rose_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxvPjuREDpE) by Bette Midler


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